A fascinating and rewarding time

Freedom to create

My time at J.W.Anderson taught me how a fresh brand functioned. I started the week of the Mens SS17 show which completely threw me in at the deep end, and taught me more than I could ever have expected. The beauty of interning in such a new and up and coming brand is the freedom to create. Every detail within each garment has been designed and chosen for a reason, it is fully considered and derived from a range of stories. The level of experimentation and constant pressure around what the designers wanted was incredibly inspiring to me.

Challenging my capabilities

My projects varied from sketching new garments and translating them into CAD’s, to illustrator colour layer separation in preparation for artworks to be screen printed. The extensive use of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop was great for me, one task involved recolouring and rescaling a number of prints to be used in the most recent SS17 collection, this challenged my capability and pushed me to learn on the job. The collection was changing day on day, the head designers assistant and I would update the line sheet of sketches, turning into CAD’S, eventually becoming coloured CAD’S.

So many decisions

I occasionally assisted in fittings where the design and garment development process continued. Once the silhouette had been decided on, we'd have to think about all the different possibilities like; which print should end up on which top? Could we try a new scale of that pocket? Which degrade colour way should sit on that skirt? We'd ask these questions at each fitting and then take pictures to demonstrate the possibilities.

The muse of the collection stayed at the forefront of each designers mind, never to be strayed from. I found the injection of a number of stories feeding into the same collection quite fascinating and bemusing, unsure of how it would all pull together.

From initial designs to reality

I was backstage at the show last Saturday, seeing the collection dressed on models with every component present, I was completely infatuated with the multi-dimensional storyline of the collection. I found it incredible to see the garments that I had worked so closely to pull together and go out onto the catwalk.

[I've had a] fascinating and rewarding internship at J.W.Anderson, it really opened my eyes to this fast-paced and hugely exciting industry." Eleana Burrows